genetic engineering and the intrinsic value and integrity of plants and animals

8/8/2019 Genetic Engineering and the Intrinsic Value and Integrity of Plants and Animals

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What do we mean by the intrinsic value and integrity of plants and animals?Holmes Rolston, IIIDepartment of Philosophy, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO 80523, USA'Value' is among our most generic positive predicates,rather like 'good'. 'Integrity' is similarly both open andcomprehensive. We will not be surprised if both ideasresist precision. Perhaps we need a caution that some ofour most treasured goals are so inclusive as to resist simple definition, as with what it means to be 'true' or 'right'or 'free' or even 'alive'. Analysis helps bring clarity, butonly when it improves our seeing a gestalt. The overarching gestalt ('truth') is that it is 'right' to respect 'life'.Such respect is ancient in religious experience; suchrespect is contemporary in conservation biology-a movement within biology as remarkable as is molecular or evolutionary biology.

Philosophers are cautious about moving from fact tovalue; that x is alive does not imply that x is good. But it isdifficult not to draw the conclusion that life on Earth, agiven, is also a good thing. One ought to respect life.Ethics has to fit that inclusive, generic duty into the particular, specific details. One approach is to ask where suchlife has intrinsic value, where it has integrity. When genotype develops into phenotype, presumptively at least eachspecies, instantiated in individuals, is a worthwhile biological achievement and an adapted fit i n its niche. Each isa distributed increment of life on Earth, instancing therichness of life collectively on this marvelous planet.1. Organismic integrity an d intrinsic valueI will be provocative, right from the start. Organisms arenormative systems. A plant is a spontaneous life system,self-maintaining with a controlling program (though withno controlling center, no brain). It executes this project,checking against performance in the world. It composesand recomposes itself, maintaining order against disordering tendencies. Plants do not, of course, have ends-inview. They are not subjects ofa life, as with the higher animals to which we come. In that familiar sense, they do nothave goals. Yet each plant develops and defends a botanical identity, an end-in-itself, posting a boundary betweenitself and the environment it inhabits. An acorn becomesan oak; the oak stands on its own.

This botanical program is coded in the DNA, informational core molecules, without which the plant would collapse into the humus. The genetic set distinguishesbetween what is and what ought to be. This does not meanthat plants are moral systems. But the organism is an evaluative system, selecting resources for itself. An inert rockexists on its own, making no assertions over the environment. But the plant, though on its own, must claim theenvironment as source and sink, from which to abstractenergy and materials and into which to excrete them.Plants thus arise out of earthen sources (as do rocks) andturn back on their sources to make resources out of them(unlike rocks).The plant grows, reproduces, repairs its wounds, and

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resists death. All this, fronl one perspective, is just biochemistry-the whir and buzz of organic molecules,enzymes, proteins. But from an equally valid-and objective-perspective, the morphology and metabolism thatthe organism projects is a valued state. The organism isintegrated; the parts co-act. Each of the parts is formed inthe way that it is because it is informed about the integrity of the whole. Vital is a more ample word now than bio-logical. The integrated life ns spontaneously defended forwhat it is itself, withou t nece:ssary further contr ibutory reference, although (as we will notice) in ecosystems suchlives necessarily do have further reference.

The plants don't care, so , ~ h y should I? Nothing 'matters'to a tree; a plant is without minimally sentient awareness. By contrast, things do matter to the animals. True,things do not matter to trees:; still, a great deal matters forthem. We ask, of a failing tree: What's the matter with thattree? If it is lacking sunshine and soil nutrients, and wearrange for these, we say: The tree is benefiting fromthem; and benefit is-everywhere else we encounter i t -avalue word. Plants do 'care"-using botanical standards,the only form of caring available to them. The plant life

is defended-an intrin.sic value.A plant is not an experiencing subject, but neither is it an

inanimate object, like a stone. No r is it a geomorphological process, like a river. Plants are quite alive. Plants, likeall other organisms, are self-actualizing. Plants are unif iedentities of the botanical though not of the zoological kind,that is, they are not unitary organisms highly integratedwith centered neural control, bu t they are modular organisms, with a meristem that can repeatedly and indefinitelyproduce new vegetative modules, additional stem nodesand leaves when there is available space and resources, aswell as new reproductive modules, fruits and seeds.

Value is a matter of choosing preferences. So-the usualargument goes-plants cannot be valuers, because they donot have any options; they are just automatic biochemistries. But if we attach value to objective life defended-rather than subjectively attaching it only to humanpreferences-a plant defends a good-of-its-kind; itdefends its life and kind as good-in-itself. To object thatthere is no value present becau.se this norm is controlled bythe genome and not selected by a conscious brain is something like objecting, on similar grounds, that there is neither information nor life in t h c ~ plant.To put this in the language of conservation biology, a

plant is already engaged in t h 4 ~ biological conservation ofits identity and kind, long b e j ~ r e conservation biologistscome on the scene. What conservation biologists ought todo is respect plants for what they are in themselves-projects in conservation biology. That aligns human ethicswith objective biology.David Heaf and Johannes Wuz, eds., Genetic Enginwing andthe Intrinsic Value and Integri.t)' ofPlants and Animals, Workshop, Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh, (Dornach, Switzerland: Ifgene, 2002). Pages 5-10. ISBN 0-9541035-1-3


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z. Animal Integrity/valueIn higher animal life, unJike vegetable life, there is somebody there behind the fur and feathers. They have eyes.They call. The animal life, with its centered experience, isorganic form in locomotion, on the loose, indifferent to ifnot desiring to avoid persons. The animal cares not tocome near, sit still, stay long, or please. It performs best atdawn, or twilight, or in the dark. Yet just that wild autonomy moves us with a conviction of escalating value andintegrity. I catch the animal excitement. Here is prolifemorion, and for it I gain an admiring respect.Plants are rooted to the spot, and they too move themselves in autotrophic metabolism, slowly, invisibly to myeye. But the animal must eat and not be eaten; its heterotrophic metabolism forces a never-ceasing huntthrough the environment, an ever-alert hiding from itspredators. If, as a carnivore, one's food moves as well asoneself, so much the more excitement. This requires sometimes stealth and sometimes speed. Unlike plants, the animal resources, though within its habitat, are at a distanceand must be sought. That is the survival game, with all animal motions close-coupled to it.The pines and oaks are objects; they live without sentience; but the squirrels and the antelope are subjects.When experiencing an item in the flora I see an 'it'. Butwith the fauna, especially the vertebrate, brained fauna, Imeet a 'thou'. I see them; they also see me. I eavesdrop;they may flee. One may spook a bighorn, but one cannotspook a columbine, and so the sense of integrity differsbecause of the reciprocity. There is a 'window' into whichwe can look and from which someone looks out. Theyhave, so to speak, points of view. There is fire in thoseeyes.The critic will say that my searching for integrity in wildlives overlooks as much as I see. The bison are shaggy,shedding, and dirty. The marmot is diseased and scarred.The elk look like the tag end of a rough winter. Every wildlife is marred by the rips and tears of time and eventuallydestroyed by them. Yes, and we must couple genetics andevolutionary ecology. The integrity sought, the valuedefended is an ideal toward which a wild life is striving. Inthe language of the geneticists, the integrity lies in thatphenotype producable by the normal genotype in a congenial environment. Integrity includes this conflict andresolution in the concrete particular expression of an individual life.3. Survival value and adapted fitThe core of Darwinian theory is survival value and adapted fit, as organisms occupy their niches. Adapted fit certainly suggests both that something is of value to theorganism, namely, adapted fit, and also that the evolutionary process can and often does improve that value, namely increase adapted fit. Adapted fit can also be lost, whichresults in extinction. Evidently, this sort of value is notanthropocentric, since organisms survived on the basis ofadaptive fit for billions of years before humans were evenon the planet-and also, of course, they almost as often\vent exti net.

We sometimes say that science is value free; and this iscorrect if we mean that science is descriptive, not prescriptive. There is no scientific guidance of human life,and hence the caution about moving from is to ougltt. Butin other senses, biology is not value free at all; to the contrary, its central theory, natural selection, is built on 'survival value'. Biologists regularly speak of the 'selectivevalue' or 'adaptivevalue' of genetic variations. Plant activities have 'survival value', such as the seeds they disperseor the thorns they make.Natural selection picks out whatever traits an organismhas that are valuable to it, relative to its survival. Whennatural selection has been at work gathering these traitsinto an organism, that organism is able to value on thebasis of those traits. It is a valuing organism, even if theorganism is not a sentient valuer, much less a vertebrate,much less a human evaluator. And those traits, thoughpicked out by natural section, are innate in the organism,intrinsic to it, if also valuable relative to the niche in whichthe organism is an adaptive fit. It is difficult to dissociatethe idea of value from natural selection. Value generatedand conserved is 'the first fact of evolutionary natural history, and the result has been the richness of biodiversityand complexity on Earth, going from zero to five or tenmillion species, and passing through several billionspecies en route.4. Integrity/value in bistorlcal species linesOrganisms exist in dynamic species lines, persisting overmillions of years, overleaping short-lived individuals.Species exist only instantiated in individuals, yet are asreal as individual plants or animals. The claim that thereare specific forms of life historically maintained in theirenvironments over time seems as certain as anything elsewe believe about the empirical world. Organismic integrity, conserved in the individual, is dynamic and flexibleover species lines. Integrity is constantly re-evolving.Speciation is sometimes in progress, yet species are evo-lutionary lines with identity in time as well as space.Processes of value that we earlier found in organic individuals reappear at the specific level: defending a particular form of life, pursuing a pathway through the world,resisting death (extinction), regeneration maintaining anormative identity over time, creative resilience discovering survival skills. Even a species defends itself; that isone way to interpret reproduction. Life is something passing through the individual as much as something it possesses on its own. The individual represents (re-presents) aspecies in each new generation. It is a token of a type, andthe type is more important than the token. It is as logicalto say that the individuaJ is the species' way of propagating itself as to say that the embryo or egg is the individual's way of propagating itself: The dignity resides in thedynamic form; the individual inherits this, exemplifies it,and passes it 00 .If, at the species level, these processes are just as evident,or even more so, what prevents integtity being present atthat level? The appropriate survival unif is the appropriatelevel of evaluation and moral concern. The individual is


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subordinate to the species, not the other way around. Thegenetic set, in which is coded the telos, is as evidently theproperty of the species as of the individual through whichit passes. A consideration of species strains any ethic fixedon individual organisms, much less any ethic fixed on sentience or persons. But the result can be biologicallysounder.

This does not mean that a species has a controlling center, any more than a plant has a brain; but ~ t the organism and the species are survival processes. A species hasno self. It is not a bounded singular. There is no analogueto the nervous hookups or circulatory flows that characterize the organism. But singularity, centeredness, selfhood, individuality, are not the only processes to whichintegrity and value attach. Identity need not attach solelyto the centered organism; it can persist as a discrete patternover time. The plant resists death; the species resistsextinction. At both levels, botanical identity is conservedover time.

Any sentiogenic, psychogenic, vertebragenic, or anthropogenic theory of value has got to argue away all such natural selection as not dealing with 'real' value at all, butmere function. Those arguments are, in the end, more likely to be stipulations than real arguments. If you stipulatethat valuing must be felt valuing, that there must be somesubject of a life, then trees are not able to value, theirleaves and thorns are no good to them, nor might moreefficient leaves or sharper thorns be any good to thespecies of which they are members, and that is so by yourdefinition. But we wish to examine whether that definition, faced with the facts of biology, is plausible.5. Captured integrity/valueThe world is a field of the contest of values. An ecosystemis a perpetual contest of goods in dialectic and exchange,propelled by value capture and transformation. The organismic integrity defends a self but it is not a self-contained;the organism incessantly moves through its environment,ingesting and eliminating it. Organismic goods are sacrificed for the goods of others. The competing, exchanging,and intermeshing of goods in an ecosystem means that thegoods of organisms are contextually situated. The valuefirst concentrated in individuals now fans out from theindividual to its role and matrix. Integrity, skin-in, needsintegration, skin-out.

One can admire flight in a peregrine falcon, or the gait ofa cheetah; but locomotion takes high-energy funding.Muscles, nerves, and brains depend, several trophic rungsdown the pyramid, on plants (99.9% of the biomass) thatsoak up the sunlight. By their concentration on capturing

solar energy, stationary plants make possible the concentrated unity of the zoological world. All heterotrophs ofspectacular evolutionary achievement live in utter dependence on plants. The system is a value transformer thatinterlocks dispersed achievements. Falcons feed on warblers, which feed on insects, which feed on plants. It is theprotein and lipids in warblers that falcons can use, that ininsects that warblers can use; the energy that plants havefixed is recycled by insects.

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Disvalue to the prey is v ~ d u e to the predator, and, withsystemic integration, perspectives change. The death ofthe hunted means life to the hunter. Nutr ient materials andenergy flow from one life stream to another, with selectivepressures to be efficient about the transfer. The pains ofthe prey are matched by the pleasures of the predator. Andmore, novel biological achievements result from predation. Autotrophs synthesize their own food; heterotrophseat something else. Could \ve have had a world with onlyflora, no fauna? Possibly Dot, since in a world in whichthings are assembled something has to disassemble themfor recycling. In any case, no one thinks that a mere floralworld would be of more value than a world with faunaalso.In a floral world, there 'would be no one to think.Heterotrophs must be built on autotrophs, and noautotrophs are sentient or c ~ ~ r e b r a l . Brains, like muscles,take high-energy funding. ( ~ o u l d there have been onlyplant-eating fauna, only grazers, no predators? Possibly,though probably there never was such a world, since predation preceded p h o t o s y n t h e ~ s i s . Even grazers are predators of a kind, though what they eat does not suffer. Again,an Earth with only herbivores and no omnivores or carnivores would be impoverished. The animal skills demandedwould be only a fraction of those that have resulted inactual zoology-no horns, 110 fleet-footed predators orprey, no fine-tuned eyesight and hearing, no quick neuralcapacity, no advanced brains.

Nor are all benefit s to the predators. The individual prey,eaten, loses all; but the species may gain as the populationis regulated, as selection for better skills at avoiding predation takes place. The prey not less than the predator willgain in sentience, mobility, cognitive and perceptual powers. Being eaten is not always a bad thing, even from theperspective of the prey species. The predator depends on acontinuing prey population; they have entwined destinies.The kills are the capture of skills. Upper level organismsuse others' vital products, organic resources that they cannot produce themselves. The integrity in individuals is anequilibrating of values in the system of life. Predation is avalue shunting device. Feeding is par t of a feedback loop,and by such value capture all the higher values (sentience,locomotion, mentality, conditioned behavior, learning)depend on the value support in the lower rungs of the pyramid (photosynthesis, decomposition). Organisms inheritvalue not only in their genes but from their competitors,enemies, and prey. There is a food chain from cheetahthrough gazelle to Bermuda grass. The system is a webwhere loci of intrinsic value are meshed into a network ofinstrumental value; and in this system the on-goingdefense of valued life generate's new achievements in biodiversity and complexity.

The context of creativity logically and empiricallyrequires this context of conflict and resolution. An environment entirely hostile would slay us; life could neverhave appeared within it. An environment entirely irenicwould stagnate us; advanced life, including human life,could never have appeared there either. Oppositionalnature is the first half of the tnlth; the second is that noneof life's heroic quality is possible without this dialectical


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stress. Take away the friction, and would the structuresstand? Would they move? Muscles, teeth, eyes, ears,noses, fins, legs, wings, scales, hair, hands, brains-allthese and almost everything else comes out of the need tomake a way through a world that mixes environmentalresistance with environmental conductance. Half theintegrity, half the beauty of life comes out of endurancethrough struggle.

6. Shared integrity/valueThis value capture is value sharing; we can shift gestalts togain a new perspective. 'Capture' is a hostile word. Thisclash of values, with more sophisticated critical insight, isreframed as symbiosis. The struggle is the dark side of theflourishing, which lights up in rich biodiversity, manifestin communities. Integrity requires dependence as much asit does independence. Things do not have their separatenatures merely in and for themselves, but they face outward and co-fit into broader natures. To dislike the interlocking value capture is something like looking at a jigsawpuzzle and complaining that the pieces are misshapen,unaware of how they fit together to form an integratedwhole picture.

Value-in-itself is smeared out to become value-in-togetherness. Value seeps out into the system, and we lose ourcapacity to identify the individual as the sole locus ofvalue. Intrinsic value, the value of an individual 'for whatit is in itself' becomes problematic in a holistic web. Everyintrinsic value has leading and trailing 'ands' pointing tovalue from which it comes and toward which it moves. Buteverything is good in a role, in a whole. Individual'integrity' has to be 'integrated' into the ecosystem inwhich the individual resides. Value has to be simultaneously distributed around and these distributed values integrated into a systemic whole. Each is for itself, but none isby itself; each is tested for optimal compliance in an intricately disciplined community. Every organism is anopportunist in the system, but without opportunity exceptin the ongoing system. Each is against the others, but eachlocus of value is tied into a corporation where values arepreserved even as they are exchanged.

From that point of view, we see conversions of resourcesfrom one life stream to another-the anastomosing of lifethreads that weaves an ecosystem. Now it becomes difficult to say whether anything of value is lost at all; ratherthese pressures seem to insist on and to build integrity.An organism must defend the integrity of its 'self', andhence the eating and capturing of value from others.

Indeed, so central is this defense of self that some biologists claim that life is invariably self-centered, 'selfish'.Theoretical biologists have come to incorporate thisorganismic genetic 'se lfishness' into what they call 'inclus i ~ e fitness'. Nothing is more obvious in biology than thatanImals often defend their own kin, because they 'share'genes with such kin. But thinking still more inclusively,one must ask how far genetic information is 'shared'.

I am again choosing words provocatively. 'Share' has theOld English and Germanic root, 'sker', to cut into parts,surviving in 'shears', 'plowshare', and 'shares' of stock.

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As used here, to 'share' is to distribute in parts the self'sgenetic information. Genes r1eproduce or communicatewhat survival value they possess; they share [=distribute inp ~ r t i o n s ] their information, lliterally, although preconSCIously and premorally. The Icentral feature of genes isthat they can be copied and expressed, again and again.They replicate. Their power to send information through tothe next generation is what counts. The genetic information gets allocated and reallocated, portioned out, andlocated in various places. Whatever the process, ratherobviously genetic information has been widely distributed,communicated, networked, recycled, and shared throughout natural history.

Genes 'divide'. They 'divide' in order to 'multiply'. Lifemust be enclosed in cells; yet c:ell division is required forcell multiplication, for ongoing life. The cell divisionrequires genetic division. 'Dividers' are required to partition out their goods and this multiplies such goods. Suchdivision and distri-buting, replilcating, recycling, togetherwith adapted fitness, places each gene where it belongs, ina commons in which it participates. The gene is engagedin dispersing vital information, in transmitting its intrinsicvalues. Genes are a flow phenonlenon. Genes must find amethod of distributing and elaborating, of proliferatingwhat values they contain and conserve. That processmakes possible the genesis of life, the accumulation of allthose values inherent in biodiversity and complexity.

Indeed, recalling the inclusive fit extended to inhabitinga niche, the survival of an organism depends as much onothers in its community and on genes it does not own ason genes that it does. Plants depend on the carbon dioxidereleased by animals, who depend on the oxygen releasedby plants. An animal must eat the grass, or eat what haseaten the grass, and so the trophic pyramid builds up.Energy and materials cycle and recycle through the system. In this system, the only capacity that the individualorganism has is to be 'self-interested', to defend its selfand its kind; but the truth is that the system requires theorganism to co-act, to operate within the dependencies,resources, and constraints of its situation, and in that senseto co-operate, to operate together with what else is aroundit.

In a drought, the survival of t h c ~ lions may not depend somuch on whether they are fleet of foot and with savagecanines as it does on whether the Bermuda grass that thezebras eat can cope with the drought, perhaps by mutations that enable the grass better to capture nutrientsreleased by fungal and microbial decomposers. In figuringout organismic integrity and intrinsic value, one needs allthe levels from distribution and integration in genes to distribution and integration in ecosystems.7. Culturing natural valuesContinuing in culture, the value


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Jet planes powered by petroleum engines and petroleumdiffer from geese with wings powered by muscles and ATP(adenosine triphosphate).

When humans a p p e ~ , in the only animal able to evaluate and choose from its lifestyle options in behavior, suchvalue capture requires justification. Value gain in humansmust be argued against value loss in the natural world.Now with an added moral dimension, we ought again tosearch for a gestalt in which values are distributed, shared,integrated, into a nature-culture synthesis. We have anobligation to argue a case for greater value achieved.The reason for the newly appearing demand for justification is that the framework of value capture changes.Value capture in the wild, though it sacrifices individuals,remains in the context of co-evolution and increased adaptive fit. The skills of the prey are sharpened quite as muchas those of the predator. Plants evolve complex defenses toregulate their grazers, manufacturing an array of sophisticated biochemistries. Even diseases and parasitism resultin more elaborated and ingenious immune systems andbodily defenses in the host, co-evolving with more ingenuity in the pathogens (often invisible to us at the microscopic levels). The co-evolutionary race continues. Thedialectic is creative.

This honing of increased integrity drops out when culture captures nature. Artificial selection is not naturalselection. The organism is likely to be selected because itdomesticates well, makes a good laboratory animal,responds to breeding pressures, is docile, and can be husbanded for the efficient and economical exploitation of thedesired genetic results. None of these pressures are likelyto increase the integrity or intrinsic value of the cultivar orlivestock. Maize, for instance, once wild in CentralAmerica, has been bred so that the grains do not fall fromthe ear, which suits the people that eat com, but means thatmaize can no longer propagate itself in the wild.John Muir contrasts wild sheep, which he admires, "elegant and graceful as a deer, every movement manifestingadmirable strength and character", with the domestic ones,which he despises, stupid "expressionless, like a dull bundle of something only half alive" ([1894] 1985, pp. 210211). Indeed, it is difficult to envision any of the properties admired (the horns, the eyesight, the agility, the musculature, the wool) except as created in the arduous environment of natural selection. After a hunt on MountShasta, Muir examined closely the carcasses ofa dead ramand ewe, and, repentant and chagrined by his kill, shouted,"Well done for wildness!" ([1875] 1980, p. 229). If thestandard of evaluation is our human subjective preferences, fashions in wool, the domesticated breeds can bebetter; but objectively, in natural systems, the wild sheep,honed to its strength, alertness, and endurance by thestruggle for survival, has more integrity by an order ofmagnitude.The domesticated is the degraded. No barnyard turkey

has the alertness of a wild gobbler. Make a pet of an animal and you degrade it, because you modify its behaviorto decorate your culture, as with a French poodle. Perhapsyou increase some skill, as speed with a racehorse orstrength with a mule. Sheep dogs may have developed

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skills similar to natural ones. Dogs for the blind are highly trained, but live quite constrained lives. But in all thesecases breeders and trainers simultaneously sacrificeautonomy and adapted fit. They are allowed to reproduceonly at our convenience. The hybrids we produce may besterile, as are mules. Or their progeny may be eliminated,as with steers.

The increasingly artifacted organism is likely to haveincreasingly reduced capacities, either by design or as anaccompaniment to other increased capacities for which weare selecting-as with plump-breasted but nearly winglesschickens, or pigs engineered with dulled sensitivities sothat they are less frustrated in their small pens.

That an organism has been genetically modified does notipso facto mean that its integrity has been compromised.The modified plant or animal might be a better adapted fitthan it was before. Species in the wild reach local adaptivepeaks, but not necessarily optimal ones, and some transgenic modification might relocate a species on a higheradaptive peak. There is always the possibility that exactlywhat one wild species needs for still better adapted fit hasbeen discovered in another line, too distant from it fortransfer by any natural genetic processes such as sexuality, hybridization, or jumping genes. A benevolent geneticist might effect such a transfer; and that would leave uswondering whether the benefited species had lost orgained autonomy.

Recently, transgenic com pllants now contain a bacterialgene that produces an insecticidal protein rendering thempoisonous to earworms. The ancient genetic alterationkeeping grains in the ear compromises the integrity of theplant more than this recent one, if indeed the latter does atall. Ifwe could genetically engineer the American chestnutagainst the introduced fungus that has destroyed it, I wouldreadily approve.

Such cases will be rare. Transgenics will regularly havereduced adapted fit, which is to say, reduced integrity.Indeed, when we move from traditional breeding to transgenic species, we want to assure that transgenics cannotsurvive on their own, lest t h f ~ y get loose in the environment. That transgenics just might become weedy adaptedfits either in themselves or by genes that transpose to nearby wild relatives is considered a major danger in geneticengineering. We may simultaneously engineer in the genewhose products we want and some terminator gene tomake sure that the organism does not reproduce unless wefacilitate the reproduction. So we must cripple them tomake them safely serviceable to us.

The burden of proof increases on those who wish tocompromise the original integrity to show that greatervalue is promised by the intrusion. Value and integrity areoften destroyed in wild nature; but there is a presumptionof replacement by species that are better competitorsbecause they have an edge over those they replace. Butthere is no such presumption "rith artificial breeding.Using an organism instrumentally does not precluderespecting it intrinsically, for there will always remainsome hybridizing of the origin.al integrity with the introduced modification for human use. So far as that integrityremains, it constrains our uses of the organism. The ques


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tion to ask is: How far has the quality of life of the organism been reduced? Have the original survival skillsbecome abnormal, stunted, crippled? Have we eliminatedthe more sophisticated qualities of the animal, dulled itdown, de-sensitized it? Maybe the transgenic sheep areonly making the desired drug in their milk and are otherwise not much different. But the pigs with human growthhormone have arthritis, walk with difficulty, and sufferhigh levels of stress.Critics sometimes object to genetic manipulationbecause it is 'unnatural'. 'Unnatural' is a dangerous nor

mative term. Most ofour cultural activities, such as attending ethics conferences, are unnatural in the sense that theyare not found in wild spontaneous nature. Diseases arenatural; we seek to heal diseases. Health too may be natural, but medically manipulated pharmaceuticals are cultural artifacts. Whether we can object to an activity as beingunnatural is case specific. Sometimes yes, sometimes no,the determining norms may come from culture not nature.Still, there is truth in the worry that increasing geneticmanipulation, recently escalated with transgenic capacities, is increasingly wmatural. That is, such- manipulationis more and more likely further to remove the animal fromits original characteristics, which once did evolve andresult in that species' characteristic integrity and intrinsicvalue. A shorthand way of phrasing this is that geneticengineering goes 'against their nature', so far as any such'nature' is still left in them.Compared to the natural processes, transgenic manipulation is violent (so to speak) with its manipulated chop'upand re-shuffle, throwing the genetic recombinationprocesses on the edge of chaos. When g ~ n e x of species Ais implanted in the gene y of species B, there results a jumble of the cutting and splicing, the error-correcting, so thatthe enzymes that are triggered try to do what they havenever been called on to do before. The process is likely tobe highly artificial, and therefore abortive, since thisgenetic innovation has not taken place through anythingresembling natural mating and recombination. Most of themanipulated material is so adulterated that it has to be dis-

Discussion following Holmes Rolston's paperDonald Bruce asked what was better: the alertness of thewild turkey in a dangerous situation in the wild or the relative dullness of the domestic species in a much safer situation. If the domestic animal is more secure, is this necessarily a degradation?Holmes Rolston replied that it is a degradation because,although they are more secure, they have less- autonomyand alertness and are unable to care and cope. They arelike pets such as French poodles with p a i n ~ ~ l s . Although barnyard turkeys are better"ttiari'b8ttery' ~ they have lost a great deal of their WiI4.i6tegrity. They arenot autonomous. They are not on their'" Own,_ If:YOll arewalking through the woods and you think ,you nU8bt. ~ v seen a turkey, if you discover that it's" at b ~ y a i i f t u r i c e y you just stroll on by; if you discover that it.'s a 'wild Qlrkey,

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carded; one hopes that a few of the adulterations justmight prove to be both viable and useful for human purposes.Although it is likely to be so, we cannot say that thetransgenic process is unnatural, more unnatural than traditional plant breeding, and end the atgUtnent ~ e r e . Even inwild nature, as geneticists are now learning, there aretransposable genetic elements, jumping genes, reticulations in cladistic lines. We humanS share most ofour geneswith animals, indeed many with plants. Nor can we complain about mutants and reshuffling, with the inevitablediscards, for this too is characteristic ofnature. But the tin-kering in nature is in search of better ~ p t i v e fit; the tin-kering in genetic engineering is in search ofmore profits.The nearer a domesticated plant or animal is to the wildtype, the more likely crossing species barriers is to violatethe integrity of that plant or animal.My conclusion is that in culture we may use, alter, engineer, transform the values found in nature, but not withoutrespect for those values. We must argue the case for anincrease of value traded against the lconservation ofintegrity. Perhaps we need something like an account ofreparations: the more we sacrifice integrity by engineeringfor our human purposes, the more obligation we simultaneously incur to see that such integrity elsewhere remainsin the wild on this marvelous planet.The genetic processes in nature are a remarkable problem-solving process, generating trial-and-error solutions,conserving the better adapted fits, and resulting in thewealth of biodiversity on Earth. Geneticists adapting thisprocess for cultural benefits, who are also generating bytrial-and-error novel biological achievements, ought tocome the better to appreciate the intrinsic value andintegrity of the life that they take into their hands.Muir, John, [1894] 1985. The Mountains ofCallfornia. New York:Viking Penguin.Muir, John, [1875] 1980. 'Wild Wool'. Pages 227-242 in

Wilderness Essays. Salt Lake City, UT: Peregrine Smith.

you have had a good day.Referring to the comment that genetic engineers mightbe able to move an organism to a higher adaptive peak,Henk V e r ~ o o g pointed out Utat the tendency at the momentis for GM organisms to be protected front their environment because they are very often not adapted to it.Rolston agreed and said that we usually do not wantGMOs to be adapted to the environment. Ninety-ninetimes out of a hundred the transgenicist will give an organism less integrity. If it has too much he might put in a terminator gene. But it would be possible for a conservationbiologist who is a transgenicist, perhaps to enable anorganism to survive in the wild when it '/Vouldn't otherwise. Here Rolston returned to the example of theAmerican chestnut which has a blight w'hich has been


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destroying it for some 75 years. But some plants persiscthey will grow until they get fissured bark and then thefungus gets in and destroys them. He would approve offinding a way through transgenics of putting genes fromthe Chinese chestnut, which is resistant, into the Americanchestnut in order to reintroduce it to the landscape.Biologists say that organisms can be on local adaptivepeaks. A species might be on one peak, but it cannot get toanother because it would have to go down and then upagain. But another species on the adaptive peak it wants toreach might have a gene which, if transferred by geneticengineering, could enable the transgenic species to getfrom one adaptive peak to the other. Genetic engineeringmight therefore have some uses in conservation biology.For the most part that will not happen because it will bedriven by profits and there will be fears that these organisms will get loose in the environment, so we would needprotection measures.

Bruce Whitelaw suggested that it might be better to modify the fungus rather than the American chestnut. Rolstonagreed that this option would certainly have to be considered by what he called restoration biology.

Judyth Sassoon turned the focus to viruses which eventhough they are not autonomous beings, evolve, fight forsurvival and are part of the whole genetic exchange flow.What right has the World Health Organisation to campaignto vaccinate and eliminate a species from the environment?

Margaret Colquhoun asked if genetic engineering wereto be used in conservation biology, would the transgenicistnot have to have an intimate knowledge of the genetics of

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the whole ecosystem.Rolston agreed but added that he might risk it with more

limited knowledge if he thought that the organism wasbeconling extinct. It would have to be case specific basedon the arguments pro and con. One thing we might havedeliberately eliminated from the environment is the smallpox virus, though it still exists in containment somewhere.He would be opposed to eliminating smallpox if it werewidespread as part ofecosystems. But smallpox was mostly a human disease carried by humans which can be studied using armadillos and not much else. Where a diseaseis a human pathogen, he said that he might want to use different criteria, because it is not in the context of co-evolution and natural selection in the same way as, for instancethe AIDS virus in green monkeys. We probably would notwant to take it out of the wild. The same probably appliesto malaria. We might want to fix it so that humans do notget malaria. Natures and Cultures are rather different. Hewould continue the co-evolutionary race in Nature, butdoes not think the co-evolutionary race is as relevant inCulture. Those two aspects come into the picture whendeciding what to do with diseases. Some biologists sayviruses are alive and some of them say they are not. Heconsiders them to be marginally alive and would not wishto get rid of a harmless virus. It does not have autonomytherefore it does not seem to have a violable integrity. Butaccount would have to be taken" of viruses that are humanpathogens. On the map of living versus non living thingsthe virus is a borderline case. But the biological world isfull of borderline cases regarding what is and is not alive.

genetic engineering and the intrinsic value and integrity of plants and animals

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